Franco Manca

Pizza

So the other month I was living in West Dulwich & popped along to Brixton market for a wander. It's a great market, lot's of little restaurants, fruit & veg stalls & some vintage shops, well worth a little wander on a Friday lunchtime. I was mainly there for pizza & to go somewhere I'd been ages ago with Daisy & wanted to try again & that place was Franco Manca's http://francomanca.co.uk/.
It's set in one part of the indoor market & get's pretty busy at lunch time. They have a wood burning brick oven & make a damn fine pizza with it.

I went simple & tasty & had the "Tomato, Galic & Oregano" pizza with a lovely glass of Montepulciano d'Abbruzzo red wine (region my dad's from) & scoffed away! The crust is lovely & crispy in the right places & what I like about this pizza is that it's not so heavy because no cheese.  One very good pizza & one of many good reasons to go to Brixton. Oh & cost around £7 which I thought was good for a pizza & glass of red!

Mishkins & The Brass Rail

Dumpling

So the other Sunday me & my friend Jason were in the Covent Garden area feeling a little peckish for a snack rather then a full blown meal so we popped along to Mishkins, http://mishkins.co.uk/?referrer=true "A kind of Jewish Deli" as they call themselves. It was around 4 in the afternoon so they didn't have the full menu on, to late for lunch & to early for dinner.

They had a couple of things we wanted to try & I went for the "Chicken matzo ball soup" & a Strawberry malted milkshake. The matzo ball is a Jewish dumpling in soup & in general the soup was pretty tasty. Pretty simple I suppose, a few bits of carrot & chicken here & there but was nice & warming & a good snack. The milkshake was not bad to.

Jason tried the "Severn & Wye lox beigel with house schmear" & went for a chocolate malted milkshake. As beigels go it was very tasty salmon with cream cheese & served with a perfectly cooked runny egg. Not sure if it was better then a beigel on brick lane but very tasty & I believe the chocolate shake was good to.

Banana pud

Had to try a dessert so we went for the "Bananas foster" which is bananas cooked with butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, rum & then vanilla ice cream scooped on top. It was pretty damn tasty & me & Jason had actually created something like this before but didn't know it actually had a name. Basically it was a comfort dessert, boozy & stodgey, in a good way.

Mishkins is a pretty cool place, you can sit at the bar as well & they do nice looking cocktails. Service was a little slow & maybe disorganized but friendly & I really want to go back to try there "Reuben on rye" which they apparently toast. The Reuben is not always which brings me to....

The Brass Rail at Selfridges! I went there with Tony (my bro) to try out there Reuben. A Reuben is basically salt beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, gherkin & Russian dressing. It's a whopper of a sandwich!

The Reuben!

It's been a famous spot in Selfridges food hall for a long time & we queued up with our tray & ordered a Reuben on rye bread each, I believe they usually serve it on sourdough bread but Tony explained how heavy & large it is, so the main carver who has been there over 33 years apparently, carved us up a Reuben on rye.

It was so big that I had to split the sandwich in half. It was tasty, the salt beef moist & the sauerkraut tangy & sweet. It did need some sort of punch so we ended up smearing loads of sachets of Colmans English mustard on. Overall very tasty & very large, though you can definitely share it with someone rather then getting a whole one each. It was a struggle to finish so had to leave the bread & just eat the contents. Mishkins for the Reuben next I think...

Assaggi

Assaggi is a Italian restaurant above a lovely looking pub on Chepstow road in West London (near Portobello, Queensway & Notting Hill). I had been a couple of times with my ma & pa back in the day & always had pretty much excellent meals, in fact at one point I thought it was the best Italian restaurant in London. It had 1 Michelin star but lost it a couple of years ago & for what ever reason I hadn't been there for ages , so.......

I booked a night to go with Tony, my bro who lives around the corner & was looking forward to going back. It's quite a small space so you do have to book usually & on the night we went it was pretty packed. We ordered a nice white wine & had some bread brought out, they do "Carta di Musica" a sardinian flat bread, then were shown the menus! Tony was immediately not happy as the whole menu was in Italian (I think it was the last time I went but never had a problem before). I can understand some Italian ok but everything is translated by a waitress. As said the room is quite small & very busy so it was really hard to hear everything clearly & as Tony said by the time we got to the bottom he had forgotten what was at the top. "Poncey" & "Disgrace" was just some of the words to come out of Tony so could tell it was going to be one of those sorts of nights. He even texted his friends who had been there recently to ask them for any pointers.

Basically I ordered & Tony said he would have exactly the same as whatever I was having so for starters we had "Lamb sweetbread with some red onions, leaf & some pancetta & a nice sweet balsamic sort of dressing". The sweetbread was very tender & quite tasty though Tony thought it was pretty bland but ok.

For mains we had the "Fritto Misto" which is a selection of fried fish (Prawns, Calamari & red mullet I think) which I've had in Italy many times & also the previous time in Assaggi which I've always loved but this time it seemed a little bland & boring. It also came with very thin crisps/chips which equally were not that enjoyable. The fish seemed fresh & ok but just had no wow or spark of any kind. Tony thought the same & basically said if he wanted fish & chips we should have gone to a proper chippy!

Onto desserts which went down very badly with Tony. The dessert menu was in English! Tony pointed this out to a couple of the bemused waiters & waitresses & asked why the main menu is in Italian & the dessert menu was in English. Not much of an answer back & a little bit of ranting then we got on with ordering. I had a Panna cotta with an espresso poured on top & Tony had a Tiramisu. The Panna cotta was nice & the Tiramisu was ok & we quaffed a couple of brandies with them which probably made them taste better then they probably were.

As we left there was a few more rants by my bro to the staff about the menu & for being to be poncey & the fact he didn't like the food to much. He also threatened to pee through there letterbox so I had to drag him away (Possibly to much wine & brandy I think) & sometime later that night after I left he phoned them up, there answer machine was in English, which riled him up so much he left a abusive message about how rubbish he thought the restaurant to be & that he would never go back! I think there was worse said but probably best not to write! So anyways a pretty bad experience & probably wont/can't ever go back.